Richard A. Behrendt

Rich Behrendt is Director of Estate Planning for Baird’s Private Wealth Management group. In this role, he serves as a general estate planning resource for Baird Financial Advisors and their higher net-worth clients. His specific duties include evaluating existing estate plans and documents, creating customized estate planning reports, and modeling various estate tax planning strategies using state of the art estate planning software.

Prior to joining Baird in 2006, Rich spent twelve years working as an Estate Tax Attorney with the Internal Revenue Service. His responsibilities at the IRS involved auditing estate, gift, and fiduciary income tax returns. He audited estates with a typical $5-10 million net worth, and in some cases significantly more. He specialized at the IRS in auditing Family Limited Partnerships and other more controversial estate planning techniques.

Rich earned his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1994. He is a member of the State Bar of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Bar Association and Milwaukee Estate Planning Forum. Rich is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School where he teaches a course in advanced estate planning.

Commentary from Rich on a wide range of estate planning topics has been featured in national, regional and trade media such as The New York Times, USA Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Registered Rep., Financial Advisor, Journal of Practical Estate Planning, andTrusts & Estates.

Fewer estates are now subject to federal estate taxes, thanks to the $5 million federal estate tax exemption. Internal Revenue Service data indicates that only 8,239 estates larger than $5 million filed a federal...

For higher-net-worth clients who are likely to owe federal estate taxes at death, making taxable gifts in 2010 may be a viable planning opportunity. That’s even if future legislation increases the estate tax...

While Congress is preoccupied with other matters, legislation reforming estate taxes remaind stalled. What should advisors be discussing with their high-net-worth clients to alleviate some of the uncertainty?

There's an important—yet unspoken—phenomenon in the world of estate tax: As the number of estate tax filings has been decreasing nationwide since 2001, there's been a corresponding increase in the Internal...